The Brooklyn artist Patrick Smith began creating strange, subtle online games ten years ago. Now redesigned for the iPad, his immersive worlds are pushing the limits of what a tablet is capable of. A still from Feed the Head No longer the shiny novelty it was at its 2010 launch, Apple’s iPad has...

Not very long ago, a dedicated comics library might have looked less like a rare books room and more like a semi-coherent junk store, containing a three-dimensional scrapbook of out-of-print books, half-completed reprint series, miscellaneous small press magazines, bound photocopies, and endless clippings. But the rise of the graphic novel category over the past...

Sometimes, trash and treasure are one and the same. Garbage Pail Kids—those gleefully hideous stickers that delighted children of the 1980s and caused some uproar among guardians of civility—pulled this alchemical trick once before, in their initial appearance as bubble-gum trading cards available everywhere for 25 cents a pack. The real trash, they...

Review of Kramers Ergot 8 (Picturebox; 232 pages, $32.95) Since 2003, the influential comics anthology series Kramers Ergot has been the premier showcase for avant-garde comics. While the mainstream publishing industry has promoted the readability of comics, this independent publishing project (edited by Sammy Harkham) has offered a fresh appraisal of...

The background of John Porcellino’s website, King-cat.net, is a Crayola-blue sky populated with fluffy white clouds. The comics artist’s digital wallpaper genially marries the aesthetics of nursery-school nostalgia to those of upbeat indie animation, but anyone familiar with Porcellino knows that he is no blue-sky artist. While his work can be charming, it is...

Harvey Pekar did not invent autobiographical comics. In the American comics tradition alone, the pioneering female cartoonist Fay King regularly inserted herself as a character in her Jazz Age cartoons and comic strips. Robert Crumb, the illustrator of some of Pekar’s most memorable works, took the self as a subject in several of his...

Robert Crumb’s new, long-form comics adaptation of the Book of Genesis may be more immediately accessible to casual graphic novel readers than to devotees of the celebrated cartoonist’s satirical, psychedelic, sexual, and endlessly self-excavating short-form comics of the past forty-two years. But this fascinating project, though vastly different from Crumb’s best-known work in tenor...

— Scroll to see more images Eleanor Davis insists that she’s no prodigy. “I think because I was never particularly a good artist, I was always aware that it wasn’t something I was good at naturally. I had to work at it really hard.” She did have a head start, though. Her parents...

Elements of Gary Panter’s style have been widely—if anonymously— experienced by countless viewers of Pee-wee’s Playhouse. As production designer for that series, Panter bore responsibility for the show’s unmistakable (and heavily merchandised) aesthetic and earned three Emmy Awards in the process. Those who know Panter’s name often celebrate his still-growing body of avant-garde comics,...